WE'VE heard a litany of horrors this week, a roll-call of the dead and their killers that is unmatchable in its evil.

The five victims of Suffolk strangler Steve Wright have gazed out of photo-graphs, their prostitution to pay for drugs revealed.

The story of Sally Anne Bowman, her life ended by Mark Dixie, who raped her carcass, has been terrible to read.

Two young blonde women were done to death by Levi Bellfield, in court this week.

These and the swaggering killers of Garry Newlove, kicked to death trying to persuade teenagers not to damage his wife's car, has encapsulated the darkest side of British life.

Long sentences have been handed out, but we are dissatisfied with that, a sense of unfinished business predominates.

We know that, however long these incarcerations, those who serve them are getting off easily.

Their time behind bars is comparatively easy. They are provided with small luxuries like television, DVD players, tobacco, and fortnightly visits: jails are not the forbidding holding pens for society's deviants they were about 50 years ago in Britain.

Daily we read of prisoners demanding compensation for small injuries they receive at the hands of other inmates.

A handful of them even demand the rights to father children inside - and are taken seriously because a denial of fatherhood is seen as an infringement of their human rights.

Inevitably, the call for the restoration of the death penalty has bubbled to the surface again, with some of the bereaved offering to administer it.

This, thank God, will never happen. Can a civilised country permit the horrors of an execution, with its pre-death vigil, its walk to the place of the death, its message that to take life is a just act?

Look at the countries where executions are rife -Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, China - and ask yourself how Britain, which gave the world its finest judicial system, can sit beside their regimes.

Then there's the fear of wrongful conviction: DNA is not the answer to everything.

That succession of mothers wrongfully accused of murdering their cot death children but later released because the evidence against them was illfounded had no DNA involved in their convictions.

The reluctance of the judiciary to stomach a death sentence is another factor.

Prosecuting counsel would not agree to take on cases that could lead to the death penalty. They would fear any inadequacy on their part would implicate them in a judicial murder.

Another factor is the sanity or otherwise of perpetrators.

Does a sane man kill a succession of street women? Does a sane man murder a young woman before defiling her body? Does a sane man hunt out blondes and bludgeon them to death? How can we be sure we weren't killing lunatics in the grip of mental illness and, therefore, not fully culpable?

The feeling of dissatisfaction in Britain this week springs from our knowing that these particular killers, sane or not, won't even begin to pay for their crimes in our penal system: their loss of liberty will be ameliorated by comfortable living.

This cannot be right. It imbues us with a notion that these killers have actually escaped justice.

We want them to face years of hardship, we want them to make reparation, through the harshness of their conditions, for the families of those they have killed.

The law is actually in place for this to happen. It's the wishy-washy liberals among us who have transformed prisons from destinations to fear into easy-going institutions with shops, prison officers who are forced to call their charges " Mr" and a thriving drugs trade to which blind eyes are turned on the grounds of keeping inmates tractable.

It's hard to stomach the likes of this trio of killers celebrating a Christmas in prison with lavish food and gifts while their victims' families mourn on the outside.

We need to know the spirit of the law is enforced. This trio must be seen to suffer hardship. We need to know their lives are uncomfortable - and we need, most of all, society to rediscover the will to implement them.

Until this happens, the five Suffolk women, the aspiring model that was Sally Ann and Bellfield's two victims are forgotten by those running our penal system.

Ultimately their killers have got away with murder and our new age of cushioned prison life is dripping down to lesser offenders.

Teenage thugs have no fear of loss of liberty. A couple of months in a young offenders' unit and they are out - bitter and more skilled in criminal matters because they've learned new tricks from the unit mates. Then they are lauded as tough men by their peers back home.

In all truth, we don't know what to do with them, struggling to find a balance between what we see as mercy and deterrence. Inevitably, we end up erring on the side of leniency because to be punitive these days is considered politically incorrect.

But we've got to wake up from our sleepwalk into anarchy, shake our nation from top to bottom.

Let's hear no more morally destitute shouts for the death penalty. Let us work within the framework of acceptable punishment for all offenders.

That will mean hardship for killers and petty offenders alike. That is highly desirable.

While a civilised society can never end a life, it has a duty to its citizens to make the existences of those who break the rules as unpleasant as possible.